Bryan Varner, one of the core developers of the stalled port of Java 1.4 port to BeOS R5 has an interesting post on his blog. Recently he met up with Ian Murdock of Sun at a local Java Users Group, and as a result he is now looking to restart the port, this time for Haiku.

Portable.Net compiles fairly painlessly under R5 under Intel (never tried PPC, but I assume that *might* work too.) But you have some BIG caveats along with that. The native threading has to be disabled currently; it could be reenabled if someone wrote a handler for it - I just didn't get a chance due to lack of time. The Garbage Collector is also disabled due to a library dependency I didn't get a chance to resolve. The version on BeBits was fairly complete. I spoke to the developer and he'd done more work - I believe he had threading working. At this point I put down the compiler not wishing to duplicate effort - left it at the 0.7.4 release minus the features I mentioned, and looked at getting GUI working. Here is where things got unstuck. I found that whilst I could get the GUI wrapper to work (as I used one I'd written for PASCAL a few years previously that was known to work) any time Portable.Net tried to call a delegate that mapped to a native function, it went caboom if it passed back any variables. Ulitimately I gave up at this point. I *could* just be my lack of Portable.Net experience, but it actually seemed like memory protection issues (segment violations where happeneing when accessing the variables passed to the delegates in the native code.) It all worked okay in a single threaded world, but multithreaded (passing data from DotNet delegate to a wrapped BWindow - probably across a thread boundary) just bombed - or worked once sometimes but never a second time. This DID work from in FPC apps though (i.e. all native code), as it was the basis of the first GUI port to Free Pascal (before the current one went ahead.)

Dunno. Didn't get enough time to look into it and I no longer have the source under BeOS because I forgot about it being on my BeOS partition before I resized my Windows partitions using Partition magic.. lol. all gone.